The Factory Slave Labor Camps in Starachowice, Poland: Survivors’ Testimonies Christopher R. Browning Although in some ways characteristic of the wider phenomenon of the Nazi exploitation of Jewish slave labor in Poland, the complex of slave labor camps in the town of Starachowice in the Radom district of the General Government was nonetheless unusual in important ways. The unusual aspects of the camps’ history, however, are helpful in studying the overall topic of forced labor since they are the exception that helps prove the rule. The use of survivor testimony as a primary source base confronts the historian with both challenges and opportunities. The major challenge in this case revolves around constructing a coherent and historically accurate narrative from the postwar accounts of 175 survivors, each of whom experienced, remembered, and told the story of the Starachowice camps in his or her own way. The major opportunity allowed by such an exceptional or rare cluster of survivor testimonies is the possibility of recovering an experiential perspective on these camps in particular, and on the wider phenomenon of Jewish slave labor in general. Background Let us first situate the Starachowice camps in the broader historical context.1 Starachowice was a small, new industrial town, directly adjacent to the old town of Wierzbnik, twenty-eight miles south of Radom and ninety-five miles south of Warsaw. A prewar Jewish population of 3,000 lived in Wierzbnik but swelled to nearly twice that number—first from the influx of Jews from Łodź and Plock, the victims of Nazi ethnic cleansing of the “incorporated territories” of western Poland; and second from the influx of Jews from nearby towns who desperately sought work in the Starachowice factories when the ghetto liquidation campaign swept through the Radom district in late summer and early autumn 1942. In autumn 1942 Heinrich Himmler was fervently trying to limit the number of Jewish workers spared deportation to the death camps by imposing two restrictions on prospective employers: first, the work was to be directly—not indirectly or tangentially—related to the war economy; and second, the Jews were to be incarcerated in special camps, both totally controlled by the Nazis and separate from the surrounding 64 • THE FACTORY SLAVE LABOR CAMPS IN STARACHOWICE, POLAND population. In Starachowice the main factories were a steel mill and a munitions plant expropriated by the Hermann Göring Werke in 1939. There was never any question that they were part of the war economy, even in Himmler’s narrowest and strictest sense. Before the Wierzbnik ghetto was cleared on October 27, 1942, the factory management constructed special camps for the Jewish slaves whom they would subsequently rent from the SS at Himmler’s specified rate of five złoty per day per man and four złoty per day per woman. As a result, while virtually all of the inhabitants of most ghettos in the Radom district were routinely dispatched to Treblinka at this time, close to 30 percent of the Jews of Wierzbnik—some 1,200 men and 400 women—were force marched to the newly constructed factory slave labor camps on the fateful day of the ghetto liquidation. Three further factors distinguished the Starachowice factory slave labor camps. First, when Himmler carried out his labor camp liquidation campaign in 1943— engulfing the D-4 camps of Galicia in the summer, the camps of the eastern Cracow district in September, and the Lublin camps in the great “Erntefest” massacre of November—the liquidation sweep stopped just short of Starachowice. Second, the Starachowice camps remained under the direct control of local factory managers and were never subsumed into the SS concentration camp system, which meant that the tenuous balance between the conflicting imperatives for destruction and exploitation gradually tipped toward the latter. Third, when the Starachowice camps were finally closed in July 1944, the prisoners were evacuated to Birkenau, where they were admitted en masse without a decimating selection on the ramp. Unlike many Jewish slave labor camps in Poland, from which there were virtually no survivors, the fortuitous combination of these factors resulted in an unusual cluster of Starachowice survivors. What can we learn about the slave labor camp experience from the “collected memories” (in explicit juxtaposition to the notion of “collective memory”) of the Starachowice survivors? It is clear that the Jews’ basic survival strategies—bribery and work—were devised long before they were sent to the factory slave labor camps. As was the case elsewhere in Poland, the Jewish council of Wierzbnik organized the allocation of compulsory labor through Jewish officials in a ghetto labor office in order to replace the capricious and unpredictable terror and arbitrary roundups. In this way the Jews became an important labor force in the Starachowice factories from which they had been barred employment in the prewar period.2 The Jewish council also Christopher R. Browning • 65 systematically bribed German officials in the hope that they would develop a vested interest in the preservation of the Jewish community.3 One dimension of wartime Poland that is starkly prevalent in survivor testimony—but virtually absent from contemporary German documentation—is the pervasive corruption and insatiable avarice of German occupation personnel. The extortion of official contributions was only one aspect of the wider onslaught against Jewish property. Jews were routinely arrested and held for ransom, and most Germans were free to walk into any Jewish residence or business and help themselves to whatever they could lay their hands on. No wonder the Jews concluded that individual greed was a major German motivation that they could attempt to manipulate for their own survival, and in the case of the Wierzbnik Jews in particular, they did so not only before but also after their incarceration in the Starachowice slave labor camps. If the Jews of Wierzbnik were correct in their assessment of German greed and susceptibility to bribes, they were wrong in their assessment of the power of local Germans. Those with a vested interest in continuing Jewish payoffs often had little or no authority to help preserve the community. Men such as Walter Becker, the local police chief and a major recipient of such payoffs, may have held the power of life and death over individual Jews and Poles in Wierzbnik/Starachowice and thus may have seemed terribly important to the local inhabitants. In terms of shaping Nazi policy and the ultimate fate of the ghetto, however, he was a total nonentity—a low-ranking Kripo officer denied entry into the SS. As the German onslaught against the Polish ghettos spread to the Radom district in late summer 1942 and it became increasingly clear that Wierzbnik would not be spared, the two defense strategies of work and bribery merged into one. The pivotal figure in this regard was Leopold Schwertner, chief of personnel for the Göring Werke. The Jewish council paid Schwertner to create more jobs for Jewish workers; Schwertner also engaged in the brisk business of selling work cards to individual Jews, even touring towns in the surrounding region to pick up Jewish workers by the truckload and smuggle them into the Wierzbnik ghetto and Starachowice factories.4 Thus one central aspect of Nazi slave labor, unusual if not unique in the long dismal history of human slavery, was that Jews—unlike other forced laborers of the Nazis— sought and even paid considerable sums for their own enslavement as a conscious survival strategy and virtually the only alternative to the even more precarious option of flight and hiding. 66 • THE FACTORY SLAVE LABOR CAMPS IN STARACHOWICE, POLAND On October 27, 1942, the Wierzbnik Jews selected for work were taken to three camps in Starachowice: Strelnica on the edge of the Bugaj forest on the north side of town, which supplied workers for the munitions plant; Majówka on the bluff between the higher and lower sections of Starachowice, from which workers were sent to the steel mill and blast furnace; and Tartak, a lumberyard south of town where prisoners lived on the premises and made ammunition crates and other wood products for the military. Strelnica and Majówka were administered and guarded by the security force of the Göring Werke, while Tartak was administered separately by the managers of the “Aryanized” former Jewish lumber business. In late summer 1943, the primitive and unsanitary camp at Strelnica was closed and its prisoners were transferred to the enlarged Majówka camp. In late spring or early summer 1944, Majówka was closed and the prisoners were again shifted to a new camp directly on the grounds of the munitions factory. It was from there that they and the Tartak workers were evacuated to Birkenau on July 28, 1944. German Policies and Personnel A succession of commandants marked three distinct periods in the mortality pattern of the main camps: an unmitigated reign of terror and killing under Willi Althoff; a crucial reversal in killing policy that preceded the partial de-escalation of terror under Walter Kolditz; and relative stabilization under Kurt Otto Baumgarten. Althoff was the chief of security for the Göring factories in Starachowice and commanded a force of Ukrainian guards. With the construction of the Jewish camps, Althoff naturally became the first commandant, and the Ukrainians became camp as well as factory guards. A handsome, well-dressed man who donned a raincoat to keep his clothes from being splattered with blood, Althoff descended on the main camps (especially Strelnica) virtually every night and left dead Jews in his wake. Many of his killings were theatrically staged for personal amusement and even to entertain guests.5 Although Althoff’s obvious pleasure in killing remains foremost in the memories of prisoners, his behavior must not obscure the fundamental factory- management policy that lay behind it.